Barry's Blog: Normalizing Trump, Parts One and Two

At some point I’m gonna be so presidential that you people will be so bored…I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people, I’ll have about 150 people. And they’ll say: ‘But, boy, he really looks presidential!’ – Donald Trump, spring 2016.

“I’m very excited to come here and ruin your evening in person.” On March 3rd, 2018, over a year after assuming the Presidency – a year, which by any standards was one of the most bizarre in American history – Donald Trump donned white tie and tuxedo and, reported the New York Times,

…joined the very journalists he loves to malign for an evening of humorous — and sometimes uncomfortable — verbal sparring at the 133rd annual Gridiron Club Dinner.

The club is “the Washington embodiment of political correctness.” The audience of 660 included Mike Pence (last year’s headliner), Madeleine Albright, Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, most of the Cabinet, six senators, four House members, media executives and military officers.

It also included dozens of journalists who make their livings attacking Trump. Each year, the dinner, wrote the Times,

…features speeches, skits and songs performed by the club’s members and invited political guests. But the highlight of the night always comes when the journalists offer the stage to the president for some self-deprecating jokes and good-natured roasting.

Trump joked about Sessions (“I offered Jeff a ride to the event, but he recused himself”), Kushner (“We were late tonight because Jared could not get through security”), Steve Bannon (who “leaked more than the Titanic”) and chaos in the White House (“Who is going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?”). Everyone enjoyed the schtick – and everyone understood that Trump’s appearance was especially meaningful.

Toward the end of his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Trump apologized that he had to be “up early tomorrow morning” to watch “Fox and Friends…This might be the most fun,” he added, “since watching your faces on election night.”

This a ritual that lets off the steam created in the daily battles of partisan politics. It also makes fun of those battles, and in doing so, subtly acknowledges that the people in the room – and there were plenty of Democrats – agree on probably 90 % of the issues, because most of them are rooted in the same social classes, attended the same elite universities and share a common sense of privilege and well-being.

We intuitively understand that the most powerful political and media leaders display their utter confidence when they are willing to made fun of. This was one of the functions of the Jester in medieval courts, and of Carnival tradition. The brief inversion of social roles actually re-enforces the validity of those roles.

But why was Trump’s appearance so significant (and did you notice the NYT’s use of the prefix Mr. before “Trump”)? Prior to that event, the NYT had often seen Trump, according to Michael Wolff, as “aberrant…a figure of ridicule.”

Since Trump had entered politics from the world of business hucksterism, reality TV and – yes – professional wrestling, the media had long seen him as a con man and a joke. During the campaign, however, The Atlantic observed that “ . . . the press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Soon after the election, writes Wolff,

…a theory emerged among Trump’s friends that he was not acting presidential, or, really, in any way taking into account his new status or restraining his behavior…because he hadn’t taken the leap that others before him had taken. Most presidents arrived in the White House from more or less ordinary political life, and could not help but be awed and reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this would not have been that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower…The big deal of being president was not so apparent to him.

Formality and convention—before he became president, almost everybody without high celebrity or a billion dollars called him “Mr. Trump”—are a central part of his identity. Casualness is the enemy of pretense. And his pretense was that the Trump brand stood for power, wealth, arrival.

A year before, the newly arrived – yet obviously insecure – Trump refused to attend this dinner, as well as the White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner. It was the first time a president had skipped such events in decades. Despite inheriting great wealth, his decades of constant bragging, tacky taste, reality-show celebrity, Mafia rumors, bankruptcies and nasty business deals had long marked him as nouveau riche. To the Washington and New York aristocracies, he had never been “our kind of people.” And he had not fared well among such company in the past. Indeed, said the Times,

In 2011, when Mr. Obama savaged him at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, Mr. Trump appeared to take it badly, and some say his decision to run for president was a result in part of his anger at Mr. Obama for the jokes.

But that had all been then. So yes, this was an opportunity for self-identified representatives of the ruling class to party well, to do a little networking, to congratulate themselves on their increased wealth and, in welcoming Trump, to ratify their authority as gatekeepers. It was a ritual of normalization.

This year – despite the saber rattling; despite the eviscerations of environmental regulations and health care; despite the transfer of billions to the mega-rich; despite the horrific attacks on Blacks, Latinos, immigrants and the disabled; despite empowering right-wing violence; despite all the corrupt cronies nominated to destroy entire federal departments; despite the nasty tweets, the insults, the investigations, the chaos, the scandals, the corruption, the firings; despite the unrelenting attacks on the media (the people in this room!); despite the sleazy adulteries, divorces and lawsuits; despite the preposterous displays of piety before evangelical groups; despite a hundred days at his golf resorts; despite all the petty, juvenile infighting; despite the possibility that he might not even survive his first term; and perhaps most of all, the daily, brazen, pathological, unashamed stench of lies – the gatekeepers were opening the gates, and Trump was confidant enough to enter in triumph, like a Roman Emperor.

After all his promises to the angry white working class that he would drain the swamp and destroy politics as usual, it was now clear to everyone present at this formal dinner that Trump was now an honored member of that same Deep State. https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/d6a3fdfe818d3d430b1c270d52bdcb23.jpg?w=548&h=548 548w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/d6a3fdfe818d3... 150w, https://madnessatthegates.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/d6a3fdfe818d3... 300w" sizes="(max-width: 274px) 100vw, 274px" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 4px 24px 12px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline; float: left; background-xg-p: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;" height="274" width="274" />Despite the fact that he had no class, he was the New Normal. And, after a year of his presidency it was clear that he, in turn, had normalized (that is, given permission) racist, misogynist and violent behavior that had previously been considered unacceptable.

Next: What is normalization? Why does it matter?

Part Two

“What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “…only they’re poor.” – Fire and Fury

The Gridiron Club Dinner was a ritual of confirmation. It didn’t make Trump acceptable. Normalization was a process that had been gradually unfolding for a year since the election – indeed, since the beginning of the primary season, or possibly for years. It publicly confirmed the end of the process, as the ceremony of awarding a doctoral degree confirms the acceptance of a dissertation that proves one’s expertize in an academic subject. It confirmed the dominance of norms over values.

Values are consensual social agreements about about right and wrong, just and fair, good and bad. Some values found universally across cultures are compassion, honesty, integrity, love, fair play, friendship, the rule of law, etc. Specifically American values include freedom, equality, opportunity, hard work and competition.

In moments of honesty, we may admit that most Americans do much of this, either directly or through passively tolerating such behavior and speech. Edward S. Herman writes:

…doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on “normalization.” This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as “the way things are done.”

This is the behavioral expression of the myth of innocence.

Of course you and I don’t act this way. We have values, and our behavior reflects them…And I have a bridge to sell you.

Gatekeepers are the individuals who are selected, or who self-select, to engage in the rituals that confirm and celebrate society’s values and norms. It seems to me that their function is archetypal; that is, such roles are so ancient that they represent a basic aspect of the psyche, both personal and universal.

For many thousands of years (and in some remaining indigenous cultures) this was one of the roles of the village elders, singers and poets. Then, for four thousand years in mass societies, priests and some kings held this role. But with the decline of religion and royal authority and the rise of science in the past 3-400 years, the media (and in the U.S., media-enabled religious figures) have taken on the role of gatekeepers.

On a different level, the United States has a very long history of working class whites who find work as gatekeepers in the streets. This is the genesis of “gun rights” as well as of the police. Others have volunteered for such work, from the Ku Klux Klan in the South and the vigilantes in the West to the Militia and Minutemen who patrol the Mexican border.

But our American media gatekeepers have a particularly important function: to shore up the gaps that regularly appear in the fabric of the myth of American Innocence and remind (or convince) us that we all share the same values and norms, that despite our differences, we all care about the general welfare, that we are all Americans.

They do this in two major ways:

1 – Marginalizing: defining what’s outside, unacceptable, dangerous – and potentially contagious. My book and most of my essays describe how and why Americans have repeated the stories of the fear of the Other for 400 years, so as to continually define themselves by what they are not. Our gatekeepers often present false equivalences between, for example, Obama “birthers” and scientists who question the official 9/11 or Kennedy assassination narratives. In between, we are told, lie the terms of acceptable debate. For more on these issues, look here,here and here.

2 – Normalizing: defining what’s inside, acceptable, non-controversial and safe. The rest of this essay will describe how the gatekeepers have (reluctantly at first) confirmed Trump’s status.

For gatekeepers of conscience, the imperative to normalize the abnormal creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Jay Rosen acknowledges that most journalists who cover Trump are perfectly aware of these factors:

He isn’t good at anything a president has to do.

He doesn’t know anything about the issues with which he must cope. Nor does this seem to bother him.

He doesn’t care to learn.

He has no views about public policy, just a few brute prejudices.

Nothing he says can be trusted.

His “model” of leadership is the humiliation of others.

I would add that, quite beyond Trump himself, they are also well aware of the sham debates, the softball questions, the unwillingness to follow bogus responses with factual information, the sound-bite time limits of discussion, the range of acceptable debate (from mainstream, loyal Democrats to far-right Republicans), the abject subservience to thugs masquerading as public servants and the patent insincerity, the parade of commentators (here are nineteen of them) who were wrong about Iraq and “weapons of mass destruction” yet who continue to pontificate on TV as experts on foreign policy.

Any child (before he or she is fully socialized) can see that neither the Emperor nor anyone around him has any clothes. But being told, repeatedly, that such people are worthy of our respect, that they are normal – despite what we see and hear – is one of the wayswe become crazy.

In this mad time, even telling us that the Emperor is not worthy becomes a form of normalization, at least when “good taste” dictates the use of euphemisms. Journalist Kyle Pope laments:

We continue to spend our days, and our audience’s time, reacting to the president’s bumbling with a level of disbelief and outrage that has boiled over into a stinking froth…Often, the strategy seems to be to simply give Trump the forum in hopes, in hopes that he’ll pay us back by saying something outrageous enough to win us clicks or viewers. If the mission a year ago was to keep Trump from leading us around by the nose, I’m afraid we have failed…Narrative has become a maligned word of late, but we find ourselves today in a news environment where the narratives are established, and the days’ Trump coverage seems largely in service of reinforcing (for the left) or debunking (the right) that narrative. We say this, the president says that, we’re at an impasse.

He has a point. Here’s another one. Over on the left side of the dial, why do Amy Goodman and other Pacifica radio commentators regularly report that Trump or some other reactionary said something and then immediately assault us – repeatedly – with sound clips of him saying that exact same thing? Is this unintentional normalization? And what’s the alternative – not reporting the statement at all?

This isn’t rocket science. The alternative is to report – in the strongest language possible – that the SOB is lying again, period. Again, any child can see this – Trump is a pathological liar, and the media’s reluctance to report this simple truth is equally pathological. Consider the verbal gymnastics that reporters have gone in the past year to avoid using that simple word: “issued a series of escalating and contradictory false claims;” “falsely asserted;” “proved to be inaccurate;” “walks a rhetorical tightrope;” “unfounded statements;” “appeared to backpedal;” “misleading;” “This White House just keeps not telling the truth over and over and over again;” and (my favorite) “undermines veracity.” This phrasing, writes Reed Richardson,

…has become corporate media’s default alternative to directly accusing the powerful of lying. But the journalistic instinct to vary a story’s language also works in favor of the powerful, allowing euphemisms for official lies to multiply throughout coverage. And rarely do these replacements do anything but weaken the indictment against the liar.

On the marginalization side are those writers and activists outside that range who are never allowed to be heard because they are too persuassive. The best example, of course, is Noam Chomsky. In 1969 – yes, almost fifty years ago – William F. Buckley allowed Chomsky onto his TV show for a debate. The Jew Chomsky kicked the ass of the Yale man Buckley, who never allowed that to happen again. Nor did anyone else.

Chomsky went on to become one of the most cited scholars in history and was voted the world’s leading public intellectual in 2005. But that was not enough for mainstream TV. Other gatekeepers have complied: Wikipedia reports that “University departments devoted to history and political science rarely include Chomsky’s work on their syllabuses for undergraduate reading.”

It’s not like items 1-6 have been kept secret. Journalists tell us about them all the time. Their code requires that. Simultaneously, however, they are called by their code to respect the voters’ choice, as well as the American presidency, of which they see themselves a vital part, as well as the beat, the job of White House reporting. The two parts of the code are in conflict…If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd. You can still do it, but it’s hard to respect what you are doing. If the president doesn’t know anything, the solemnity of the presidency becomes a joke. That’s painful. If they can, people flee that kind of pain. In political journalism there is enough room for interpretive maneuver to do just that. This is “normalization.”

…normalization is a key part of how it works. It resides in the way that we speak, in the ideas that get refined and reworked and encoded in ordinary words until they seem harmless enough. It’s the ability to fit things into a narrative that flatters our ability to reason.

…we normalized Trump long ago…It would be comforting to think that we had seen some collapse of moral standards and reasoned debate during the last few years. But Trump prospered because too many Americans learned long ago to accept dishonesty, demagogy, and even criminality in their leaders.